Good luck to the church of COVID. They’re going to need to it. The narrative’s crumbling.

It’s about damn time.

Good luck to the crowd who cheered for restrictions that disproportionately hurt poor people. Good luck in 20 years looking back at millions of 6-year-olds wearing masks for 8 hours a day. Nobody’s going to say, “Wow, what a great idea that was!” I promise they won’t.

Good luck explaining how supremely healthy young people were compromised for a disease that killed zero NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB or NCAA athletes — over three seasons now.

Good luck. The cowards in charge now have negatively impacted three college basketball seasons when college basketball players show a 100-percent survival rate to COVID-19. Good luck living with the time a future Air Force officer was forced to miss games while he was perfectly healthy. “Every game is special,” senior A. J. Walker told me. As coach Joe Scott said, there’s a “finite time” for service academy cadets to play games before they begin five years of active duty. Nevertheless, the cultists are still taking games away. Good luck to the hysterics who used young people as shields.

Sports are small beans in the grand scheme of things. But it was sports that opened my eyes to the manic nonsense of the past 22 months. They were opened when health “experts” advocated for mass protests in the name of social justice — after telling everyone to stay home, before the NBA played in a Florida bubble, before trying to shut down high school and college football. My eyes haven’t been closed since. Good luck, after all this, restoring the credibility of news media, public health bureaucrats and Democrat politics. When you’ve been that wrong about that much for that long, smart people don’t listen anymore. We won’t listen the next time, either, so good luck.

Good luck, because they’re truly going to need it. The masks narrative predictably is falling apart. (Those crazy anti-maskers in Douglas County were called worse after leaving the Tri- County Health Department, and during COVID’s most contagious wave had the same outcomes as the counties they left behind.) Vaccine passports are a disaster. Naturally acquired immunity is finally accepted weeks after critics framed NFL star Aaron Rodgers as a flat-earther for raising the issue. Rodgers said then, “That’s the best boost to immunity we can have.”

Last week the CDC agreed. Funny how that works. The Science is on a lucrative time delay. The opposite of every major COVID restriction would have been better on the whole.

I tried to recall the most ridiculous “protocols” in sports since the pandemic response began in March 2020. Some are important, most are not, and 22 months later Colorado is still playing pandemic so you tell me if they were effective. There was the cleaning crew with Ghostbuster backpacks at Ball Arena spraying disinfectant on the seats ... where nobody had been sitting, since fans were banned from games. There was that one time CHSAA wisely requested a “mask timeout” for teenagers forced to wear masks while playing high school hoops. CDPHE said no.

Don’t forget when Coors Field banned peanuts.

Oh, this was a good one: Colorado’s public health wizards required a 30-minute break between prep games to “clear the air” in the gym. Clear the air, folks. Never forget that one.

Readers have asked why a sports columnist has written so often about the burden placed on kids over two years. My answer is simple: we are obligated to report on the most important things. Kids are the most important things, and their wellbeing has been prioritized dead last.

I write this as an apolitical person who believes politics are toxic: the cowards still pushing harmful restrictions on kids are all Democrats. So good luck when the kids they crushed over and over — for a virus that’s rarely serious for their demographic — are old enough to vote.

Really, good luck with that. The science they’ve followed is political science. The science changes with polling numbers.

Wait, just remembered another good one. Donut giveaways. That was fun. Get the jab, get a donut, never mind that almost 80 percent of hospitalized COVID patients were overweight. How about mandate exercise? Sports are coming around. Took too long, but they’re coming around. The NCAA now considers athletes who recovered from COVID to be “fully vaccinated.” The NHL stopped testing healthy players. Good luck explaining how COVID all but vanished from the NFL — voilà! — in time for the playoffs. Over 500 players were on the COVID list in December. Then Wild Card weekend had seven. It’s a miracle! Or it’s because 30 million watched Wild Card games.

Maybe sports are coming around since MVPs in the NBA (Nikola Jokic), MLB (Freddie Freeman) and NFL (Rodgers, the presumptive winner) all caught COVID before they were named MVP.

During his quarantine, “I was with my girlfriend, so it was actually kind of a vacation for us,” Jokic said then. “I work out every day. I enjoy every day. So it was actually not that bad.”

The favorite to win NHL MVP, Connor McDavid, recently caught a positive test. Place your bets.

Good luck scaring people with hospitalization numbers when New York flat-out admitted 40 percent of “COVID hospitalizations” were admitted for something else. Good luck explaining why the Los Angeles Rams could host 70,000 fans at a playoff game the other day, and USC and UCLA were still forced to play their basketball games in front of empty stands.

And here come the Olympics in Beijing. Isn’t that perfect? China’s bringing back anal swabs.

Good luck with that.